What's the best possible email failover solution

[Bill Moran]

Matthew Seaman <m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 05:25:20PM -0400, Bill Moran wrote:
>  
> > The return can be significant.  The company I am doing this for provides IMAP
> > mail services for business.  If a filesystem crashes and service is down for a
> > while, we can easily lose clients.  If we had some sort of failover, we'd be
> > able to just switch the IP on the backup machine and life would be good.
> > 
> > "long way to go" is what I'm trying to establish.  I was hoping to find
> > something workable without reinventing the wheel.  For example, Postgresql can
> > do real-time replication between two Postgresql servers using Slony.  If I can
> > find an IMAP server that will keep the mail folders in PostgreSQL, I've got my
> > failover system ... tada!
> 
>     http://wiki.dovecot.org/moin.cgi/DovecotPostgresql

Unfortunately, this only keeps the user database in Postgresql, but not the
mailboxes themselves.  We already have the equivalent of this using LDAP, and
I'm in the process of setting up a slave LDAP server for redundancy.

It's the mailboxes themselves that are difficult to get.  Best we've got right
now is backing up the Cyrus mail folders using rsync ... but this is very time-
consuming, and (thus) only done once a day.  In order for it to be done right,
Cyrus has to be shut down while it's backing up.

Thanks Matthew!

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com